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Rose Rustowicz, a member of the Maryvale High School Class of 2011 and Rochester Institute of Technology Class of 2015, has been offered a Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant to Iceland in physical sciences. This announcement was recently made by the United States Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Fewer than 2,000 students in the nation receive this prestigious award each year.

Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Fulbright Scholars travel abroad for the academic year through annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The program operates in over 160 countries worldwide.

The prestigious Fulbright grants are awarded to some of the brightest and most ambitious students nationwide. Fulbright alumni have achieved distinction in government, science, the arts, business, philanthropy, education and many other fields. Fifty-three Fulbright alumni from 12 countries have been awarded the Nobel Prize, and 82 alumni have received Pulitzer Prizes.

Rustowicz is no stranger to academic honors. In 2014, while part of RIT’s swim team, participating in extensive community service activities and spending four months studying abroad in New Zealand, Rustowicz was named a 2013-2014 Outstanding Undergraduate Scholar by Rochester Institute of Technology. Only 1 percent of RIT students receive this recognition in any given year.

While in Iceland, Rustowicz will be joining a research team from the University of Iceland’s Center for Remote Sensing to conduct remote sensing work at the Hekla volcanic site. The project team will create a multidisciplinary assessment of the landscape, which will allow them to quickly and reliably map and monitor hazardous and vulnerable areas.

Rustowicz will be heading to Iceland in mid July to aid in fieldwork data collection. Following this, she will use her imaging science education to complete several remote sensing and image processing tasks such as preprocessing images for atmospheric compensation and contributing to the development of classification algorithms to quickly identify and classify the data. Rustowicz plans on being in Iceland for the entire duration of the Fulbright grant until May 2016.